It came without warning at the third hour after midnight. Just then, the celebratory bonfires of the Feast of Clean Water had burned down to mounds of glowing red embers. The exhausted citizens of Crown-Reach slept deeply in their beds.
First came the sound—not an explosion, not the crack of thunder, and not the roar of a collapsing city wall. It was a low, underground groan, an ancient sound shaking of unimaginable mass and thickness that originated sixty miles beneath the earth’s crust and traveled up through the living bedrock of the land-wide shelf. In the dark printing pressroom of Printer’s Alley, the forty-pound lead balance weights on the screw-presses began to sway in slow, rhythmic circles. In the taprooms along the river quays, pewter tankards hanging from brass ceiling hooks chimed together in a clashing, nonstop clinking.
Then the earth shuddered.
A massive, rolling ground-shaking blast wave lifted the granite cobblestones of Weaver’s Square two inches into the air. Chimney pots shattered against the flags. Slate roof tiles slid in cascading sheets into the streets. Church bells in forty-eight steeples swung wild on their pivots, striking three muffled, scared chimes in the darkness. And thousands of black rooks exploded from the cathedral towers, screaming into the moonless sky.
